Between Indigence and Indie

T. S. Eliot once remarked that the only way to understand Ezra Pound was to start with his earliest poems and read them in chronological order.  If you ever got to the point where Pound’s poetry stopped making sense, you had to just back up and start over again.  I’d read Pound before reading Eliot’s suggestion and found him to be opaque and indecipherable.  Taking Eliot’s suggestion seriously, I started anew—something the Library of America’s volume makes quite simple.  Eliot was right. 

[Though, I suppose I should add that the Cantos are perfect for people who think Finnegans Wake has too much plot.  I guess I should also add that while I think opening up Finnegan’s Wake to a random page is funny, I get no such amusement from opening the Cantos at random.]

But, I didn’t set out to write about Ezra Pound.  The real topic here is Kurt Vonnegut.  I’ve read lots of books by Vonnegut in the past.  I remember enjoying reading every one of them.  But, in one of the most truly odd literary occurrences, within a fortnight of reading a Vonnegut novel, I had absolutely no memory of anything that happened in the book.  That happened every single time I read one of his novels.  They were fun to read and all, but they just made no sense and so nothing stuck in my memory.

Is Vonnegut like Pound?  I am beginning to think so.  Taking advantage once again of the always invaluable Library of America, I started reading Vonnegut in order.  Several months ago, I read Player Piano, Vonnegut’s first novel—and it shows.  Move along; nothing to see here.  It was a surprisingly conventional novel—nothing akin to what one expects from Vonnegut.  If he had kept writing books like that, nobody would have heard of him today.

But, his second novel, The Sirens of Titan is Pure Vonnegut.  And it is marvelously fun.  Quirky beyond belief –a seemingly wild random ride that ends up all linking together in the end.  And—this is the part worth noting—it coheres.  Being the first such novel, there are just enough of the wires showing to give one a sense of how this thing was constructed.  The basic plot is perfectly circular—the type of thing that Janet, who hates looping time travel stories, would hate.  (By the way, the recent Doctor Who invention of “Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey” was a hysterical dodge to avoid the inherent problem of maintaining continuity in a 50 year long science fiction series in which time travel is the whole point.  (And, while on that aside—Matt Smith had a great run.  And much to my genuine surprise, with that last episode (on Christmas!  I think Clara was more excited about Doctor Who than her presents), suddenly his whole run made sense.  I have given up hope that there was any structure to the assorted story lines—I thought they just forgot about the whole smiling crack bit.  Nicely done.  (If that doesn’t make any sense, you don’t watch enough Doctor Who—your loss, by the way.))) And in the midst of that circular plot (back to Sirens of Titan here—think of the paragraph as circular if that makes you feel better), there are all sorts of crazy subplots having nothing to do with anything, but amusing in their own right.  (There is even a proto-“Harrison Bergeron” which was much better done in the short story than in the novel.) 

This is the first time I finished a Vonnegut novel with the impression that there is something memorable there.  It is also the first time I ever remember thinking that I would read Vonnegut again very soon.

One other thing worth noting: in the middle of the novel, a character creates a new religion: The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.  A fascinating thought experiment, that.  Compare this Church to Sartre’s Naseau.  In both the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent and in a state of total existential nihilism, there is no point to anything.  But, is it more comforting to think that world is meaningless because there is Nothing or because the God who created everything is totally and completely indifferent to the creation?  Oddly, those two worlds would be observational equivalent—if you live in one, surely someone would think the world was actually the other.  So, while at one level it would make no difference which was right, I suspect most people would rather live in one universe than the other.  But, I am not sure which is more attractive.

There is no point in denying the attractiveness of a universe in which God the Utterly Indifferent exists.  It solve the problem of how to deal with things like this, for example.  If God is Indifferent, then why should any of the rest of us be otherwise?  So, that would be comforting.  But, then we’d have that problem of wondering why God was so Utterly Indifferent and that would be rather insulting—after all, I care about Me, so shouldn’t God care about Me?  So, maybe Nausea is better, though how nausea could be a preferred state is hard to fathom.  It’s almost like the more you think about it, the more you realize that maybe it’s better if there is God the Not So Utterly Indifferent.  All of which gets me wondering why there are people who seem to hope it is a godless universe.  I understand doubting the existence of God, but I am genuinely baffled by people who seem passionate about the desirability of such a thing.

Vonnegut’s human history is senseless from our standpoint—that is the whole point of The Sirens of Titan.  Yet, there is a merriness in the senselessness.   I do understand that—if there is no point to any of this, then why not take joy in it?  Happiness is underrated in modern philosophical circles.